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House Update

Tuesday, 19 October 2010

Moving into a house here is not necessarily easy. There are several things that need to be in place in order for the house to be livable and unfortunately, those things run on Africa time.

Halliburton has a separate water tank and pump installed on the house to help with water pressure. Without it, water only dribbles out of the taps and even that varies throughout the day. It will also provide a bit of back up for water outages.

We are also getting a generator installed that will be able to run the entire house during power outages. So far, we’ve only experienced minor outages but some times the power does go out for days at a time so a generator is necessary.

Our biggest problem right now and the main reason that we haven’t been able to move into the house is the electricity. For some reason, we have yet to figure out why, there is not enough electricity coming into the house. We have been unable to plug in any of our appliances because that causes the power to go out in the house. We have notified the power company and they say that they need to come replace the box outside of the house in order to up the amount of electricity we can get. We were told they would do it last Monday but of course, no one showed and when we inquired they replied, ‘These things don’t happen overnight.’ Apparently, they don’t happen over 18 nights either.

We are getting closer to having things in order. The water pump has been installed but unfortunately, when it turns on, the lights go out. A concrete pad for the generator has been set and we are just waiting for the generator. Everything else must wait on the electricity company and who knows when they might get around to it.